Tesis Magíster en Didáctica del Inglés Universidad Surcolombiana. Facultad de Educación, Maestría en Didáctica del Inglés. 2017

Introduction -- Research problem, satament of the problem, needs analysis, related studies, setting and rationale, rsearch questions, objectives, general objective, specific objective -- Literature Review, speaking, elements of speaking, language processing through speaking, the notion of teaching speaking, goals of teaching speaking, principles of teaching speaking, different factores affecting student’s efl speaking skills, the notion and purpose of communicative language teaching, (CLT), developing speaking activities, the evaluation grading scale of speaking skills, context for ICT in fifth grade in a EFL environment, useful tools in developing/Improving speaking skills with the hel of ICT, videos, podcasts, virtual worlds, virtual learning environments, (VLE) for schools -- Methodological design, research design, research approach and type of study, participants, teachears researchers, instruments and data collection procedures, instructional desing, instructional stages -- Data Analysis and findings -- Conclusions and pedagogigal implications

"This research has five chapters, where chapter 1 presents an explanation of the research problem, showing the different foreign language learning problems in speaking skills presented with the participants describing the setting where the study took place. Additionally, some related studies are presented to show how they contributed to shape this research work, and the objectives that led our research. Chapter 2 introduces the main concepts of speaking and Virtual Learning Environments as the main constructs supporting them with the authors selected for this dissertation. Chapter 3 explains the methodology used in the research project. First, the type of research approach and the type of study selected are defined; second the participants and the criteria for selecting them for this research study, third the different instruments applied during the development of the project and the data collection techniques. Chapter 4 entails the development of the research stages and how data was analyzed and the categories that emerged from this analysis. Finally, chapter 5 states the findings and main conclusions of this analysis, showing the pedagogical implications as well as the limitation of the studies and further research. "